Nicholas Dane

by Melvin Burgess

  He’d heard these kinds of allegations before. Dirt slinging for the sake of it. It was always the lowest little toads who tried it on, and it was always at the most respected members of staff they tried it on with.

  ‘Now is not the time for complaints by you, Dane,’ he announced. ‘Now is the time of punishment. When your punishment is over, you can complain then, if you like. But let me tell you this. Let me tell you! No amount of complaining will alter your situation one bit - not one little bit. All you’re doing is making things worse for yourself. I have no doubt these ridiculous complaints will fade away, just as they always have done with other boys before you. And I warn you, Dane - listen to me! I warn you! If you do see fit to try and carry this nasty little plan of yours through, trying to soil the reputation of a man who has done nothing but good to you and hundreds of other boys who have passed through this establishment, it won’t be him who’ll suffer. Your horrible little story will show itself for what it is - a web of deceit and lies, designed with no other purpose in mind but to take the heat off your own precious person. It won’t work - do you hear me, Dane? It. Won’t. Work. In fact, it will go very ill for you. I do not take kindly to unsubstantiated complaint making. Understand?’

  Nick understood perfectly.

  ‘As for now, you will be kept in the Secure Unit for two weeks. You will be flogged. I shall recommend twelve. You will be flogged again the next day and the next for three days. If at the end of that period you wish to complain, you may ask to see me. And let me tell you this. If you do ask to see me, you’d better have some very good evidence. Do you understand the word? Proof. Facts. Because if you don't, what’s going to happen to you now will be like a bloody picnic. Understand!’

  The boy said nothing more, just gaped at him like the village idiot. Mr James waved a hand and the two prefects marched him out.

  Disgraceful. That was where you got from being kind to that sort. He’d spoken to Mr Creal about having boys up to his flat before now. Some nasty little piece of work was always going to try and make capital out of his kindness. But to a man like Creal, whose commitment Mr James could only wonder at, such accusations were part and parcel of the job.

  He’d have a word with him about this one, just so he’d know what he was up against.

  Mr James sighed shakily as the door closed and put his head in his hands. He could so much be doing without this just now. His wife was currently going through one of her good spells - that’s what she called them anyway. He didn’t. Admittedly she got up and did things - but the things she did! Loud music, dancing in the garden, running about in her dressing gown, barely covered up. The boys loved it, of course. They thought it wonderful that the headmaster had a mad woman for a wife.

  Mr James walked to the window and waited until the prefects had led the criminal away before he went downstairs and made the short walk through the grounds to his house, to see how his wife was getting on. As he turned the corner through the gate, he gave a gasp of horror and broke into a fat, wobbly run. There, for all to see, perched on the front room windowsill wearing only her nightie, was Janice. She’d opened the top light to the window and was trying to wave at someone to attract their attention. As he wobbled up the path, Mr James caught sight of Ben Jollie, the groundsman, standing by his barrow and staring at her blankly.

  ‘I’ll take care of it, Jollie,’ he gasped. Thank God he’d remembered to lock her in. The last time he’d forgotten to lock up, he came back to find her wandering around the grounds in her nightie, telling the boys she was being kept prisoner against her will and encouraging them to escape with her.

  It looked as though she was trying to climb out through the window. As soon as she saw him running towards her, she jumped down from the sill and ran off into the house. He fumbled with the front door key, and burst in to find her standing behind the door with the poker in her hand.

  ‘Stay away from me,’ she commanded.

  ‘Janice, darling, what’s wrong?’ he pleaded.

  ‘I demand my freedom,’ she quavered in a high treble. ‘You’ve kept me prisoner here too long. It has to end. Bill, I demand you let me call the police and give me back my freedom.’

  Mr James sighed. She’d been withholding her medication again. She did it from time to time, hid her pills under her tongue, spat them out when he wasn’t looking. And then went mad.

  He sighed, locked the door carefully behind him, and, with one eye on the poker trembling in her hand, began the long business of talking her down.

  13

  The Secure Unit

  The Secure Unit was a small room on the ground floor at the back of the main house, with one small barred window high in the wall, well out of reach, a thick door and a tiled floor. It was furnished with a bed, a table and a chair. Its supposed purpose was to house very vulnerable children, those at high risk of absconding and running away into dangerous circumstances. In practice, at Meadow Hill the Secure Unit was for punishment. Inmates were kept there in solitary confinement.

  From time to time, a visiting social worker expressed surprise that the Secure Unit looked so much like a prison cell, and it had to be pointed out to them that the kind of boys who had to be put in there (for their own good) were often so violent that even the table and chair had to be replaced on a regular basis. That much was true. After a week or so of nothing to do and no one to speak to (unless, as in Nick’s case, it was being taken out to be beaten once a day), most boys went through a period of rage before depression took over. At some point, they’d almost always turn their attention to the only things around that they could affect in any way at all - the table and chair, which they duly smashed to match-wood with every sign of satisfaction.

  In defence of Mr James and other members of staff, it should be said that most of them lacked the imagination to work out for themselves what havoc days on end with no company and nothing to do can work on the human psyche. They would have been most surprised to know the levels of despair felt by the boys left in that place for any length of time, although they knew enough to make sure there were no belts, ropes or knives left in the room. Self-harm and even suicide were known things at Meadow Hill, particularly in the Secure Unit. No one wanted any repeat cases.

  For a while, being locked away was something of a relief to Nick. Away from the constant threat of violence that hung over the Home, he was able to relax for the first time in weeks, to think things over and even find a little time to mourn his mother. It was only after a few days that the long, black night of the soul settled on him.

  The first day, waiting for his interview with Mr James, was positively helpful. He’d soon come to his senses. First and foremost, he was horrified at what he’d done to Oliver. He’d completely lost control. It had been a moment of the blackest despair, the removal of all his hopes and the realisation that he had been fooled. The one man he thought of as his protector was anything but. Even so, it was no excuse and by the time he was marched in for his interview with Mr James, Nick was in no doubt that the main culprit, alongside himself, was Tony Creal.

  He knew exactly what he was going to say to the headmaster. By the time he left, he knew that he was wasting his time. No one was ever going to listen to a word he told them about this matter ever again. It was then, sitting alone in his cell, waiting day after day for the terrible beatings the head had ordered for him, that the darkest despair began to descend.

  The first thing Mr James did, once he got Janice dosed and in bed and his own head full of Valium and gin, was to ring up his deputy and tell him what the boy had said.

  ‘You need to be more careful, Tony,’ he slurred. ‘Taking little shits like this one into your flat with no one else there. It’s asking for it. Of course they’re going to try and use it.’

  ‘I’m not thinking of myself,’ said Mr Creal.

  ‘I know, I know. The trouble is, Tony, the trouble is -well. You’re just not a very good judge of character.’

  Tony Creal put down the telephone
and sat for a while at his desk. His feelings at that point were more hurt than angry. Perhaps the head was right. Of course he was aware that he had manipulated the situation, but somehow, he always managed to convince himself that it was all for the best. Jenny Hayes was no sort of a carer - Mrs Batts had said so herself. As for the Pieman, with his druggie history and his money, the boy would have been in the most terrible danger. Money and drugs were a lethal combination to boys of his kind, it would have been tantamount to abuse, letting him go off with someone like that. As for boarding school, the boy would have been a fish out of water. No good at all...

  Meadow Hill had its faults, of course; but against the Toms and the prefects and so on, there were people with heart - Tony Creal himself for example, taking care of you, watching out for you, getting close to you. Helping. There was nothing like a close, loving relationship to get you back on the straight and narrow, whatever age you were. Society might not share his ideas on the nature of that love - well, society was wrong. He’d helped countless boys. The fact that he shared himself with them - gave himself to them, you could say - might be unprofessional in a strict sense, but in fact there was no evidence at all that it did them any harm - none that he’d seen anyway. On the contrary, he firmly believed that the boys he gave the most to, put the most back in.

  All this he had done for Nick Dane, and what was his reward? The boy had turned on him. He’d helped him, offered him comfort, put himself on the line. Trusted him. And he had been repaid with betrayal.

  ‘What does he want?’ he muttered to himself. ‘My whole bloody soul?’

  As the day went on, his anger grew, but later, it began to be mixed with pity, and a certain amount of understanding. The boy was upset - it was understandable. Of course, it was unforgivable that his pain should come out in the form of violence, or that he should betray someone who only wanted to help him, to love him. But he had come to Meadow Hill much later than most of the other boys. Obviously, the idea that he was stuck there had cut deeper than Mr Creal had believed it would.

  ‘I should have moved more slowly,’ he thought. After all, the boy had lost his mother. His heart was bruised. He should have been more cautious before trying to get so close to him.

  He’d have to pay Nick Dane a little visit and see what could be salvaged.

  The beatings were given by Mr Toms, so it could have been better and it could have been worse. At least it wasn’t the Chimp. Three nights, three beatings. Even Mr Toms baulked after the second day at giving him another twelve, and he only got eight on the third day. The worst thing about it was, it was the only thing that happened each day. There was nothing else to think about. By the time the beatings came along, after school at five o’clock, Nick was almost ready to run out and beg for it.

  Mr Creal waited for the beatings to end before visiting him. He wanted to show him that he was still prepared to be his friend, in spite of everything. He did everything he could to make him see reason - really emptied his bag of tricks at the boy’s feet. He reasoned, promised, wept and begged. He opened his heart, but all he was able to inspire was disgust.

  He was there for nearly an hour and in all that time, Nick made only one promise to him.

  ‘I’m going to get out of here,’ he said. ‘And when I do, I’m going straight to the police.’

  Mr Creal waited another few days before he went to pay Nick his second visit. Love was one thing, but only a fool sits by while his life is destroyed. To drive the message home, he took a couple of colleagues along with him. One of them, Mr Jameson, was the maths teacher at the Home school. The other Nick had not seen before, but Mr Creal made sure before they left that evening that Nick knew that he was a policeman.

  They came in the dark of the night. The first thing Nick knew about it was when a torch was switched on and he awoke to see the men standing around his bed.

  ‘Telling tales, Nick,’ scolded Mr Creal, smiling and shaking his head. Someone above him leaned down and pressed his shoulders into the bed. And then the lesson began.

  There’s no details necessary for that night’s work. There were three men in the room with him, and it was rape. Nick’s ordeal lasted an hour. As the door closed behind his visitors at the end of it, Tony Creal poked his head around the door for a parting shot.

  ‘We’ll see you tomorrow, Nick,’ he whispered fondly.

  Every night after that, Nick went to sleep not knowing if this would be another night like that one. It made the nights long, you can believe that. Creal and his friends fully intended to pay Nick another visit before he was let out, but as it turned out, they never did. Over the next three days one or other of the three had some engagement or other and the day after, Mr James had a letter from Mrs Batts.

  She was under pressure from two fronts. First, Michael Moberley had written to her asking to be kept informed about the boy’s progress. Simply by asking, he was helping Nick. There was a wealthy eye on him, and that in itself was enough to make the social services cautious. At the same time Jenny had stepped up her pestering in an attempt to win Nick back, and the social worker had felt obliged to take the unusual step of asking Mr James directly if Nick could be granted a home visit, just to see how things went this time.

  Of course, in the light of recent events, Mr James felt unable to grant her request - but all the same, he was alerted that people outside the home were interested in the fate of Nicholas Dane. He knew nothing of Mr Creal’s midnight visit, of course, but even so, two weeks in the Secure Unit, and three doses of twelve strokes were a severe punishment indeed... and so Mr James decided it was expedient to cut short Nick’s punishment.

  They say that rape victims divide their lives into two parts - before, and after. Rape is the line that turns you from one person into another, from fearless to fearful, from relaxed to anxious, from hero to victim. The secret of recovery is to lose the fear - to stop being a victim and become yourself again.

  Some people find pain sticky. They try to rub it off but it just gets on their hands. The more they wipe and scrub, the further it seems to go, like treacle on their skin. Others cope better. They lick the sore place and the wound shrinks and heals to a neat little scar that only hurts when they press it directly.

  A lot of things can affect it. How well equipped the past has left you, for one thing.

  Davey O’Brian, for example, had been abused for as long as he could remember, by his mum and dad and older brothers and sisters to start with, and then by various house tutors, teachers, policemen and other figures who had held authority over him. It was mainly violence. Davey was a tough-looking lad, not unattractive, who moved like a terrier and was so full of energy, you could have lit a small town off him for a week if you could find a way of wiring him up. But he didn’t have Nick’s good looks, and the likes of Tony Creal left him largely alone. Even so, he could have told a tale or two, if tales of that kind had been something the boys discussed.

  There was one Home he’d been in where the tutors used to come into the dorms to pick which boy they wanted that night two or three times a week. Davey being Davey, he’d learned a few tricks to put them off. As a five-year-old, he already knew to save his toast crusts from breakfast, chew them up and spit them onto his bed covers at night, so the men would think he’d been sick and leave him alone. Or he’d pick up the piss pot from under a bed and pour it on his sheets.

  ‘Don’t touch him, he’s a pissy pants,’ the men would say, and they’d pass on to the next bed.

  Davey had his share - but he had something else: his family. Nine brothers and sisters, God knows how many cousins, aunts and uncles. The ten children in the O’Brian crew fought like dogs among themselves but let anyone try to batter an O’Brian outside the family! You’d be tom to pieces. They had nothing in the world but each other, and they stuck together every bit as hard as they fought together.

  Davey had the street, too. People knew the O’Brians for miles around and there was always someone who’d keep an eye out for the little
ones and part with a jam sandwich, or take them in to bathe their wounds. It wasn’t enough, of course. The prisons were going to be full of O’Brians for years to come, locked away for stealing, mugging, drinking, snorting, injecting, armed robbery, even murder in one case. But some of them got through, two or three - with a little help from their brothers and sisters, and a few sympathetic faces among the families who lived nearby.

  Oliver, at the other extreme, had no one. His troubles had begun when he was raped by his mother’s boyfriend when he was three years old. A neighbour who made a little extra cash as a childminder found out about it when Oliver had to go to the loo and she found bruising around his bottom. All might have been well even then had his mother reacted differently, but she had been unable to accept that her lover was a rapist.

  Over the next month the rapist controlled Oliver with lies and threats - that his mother hated him and would leave him if he made her unhappy, by, for example, telling her certain secrets. But despite all his bluster and cunning the truth eventually came out when the little boy began bleeding. The boyfriend fled when his distraught mother insisted on taking him to hospital, where the doctors confirmed repeated buggery.

  It would be nice to think that repentance and atonement followed discovery, as it does in the good old story books, but as we’ve already seen, life’s not always like that. Not just the knowledge of what had been done to her innocent, but her own part in it made the little boy hateful to his mother from that day on. She did her best, but his inability to trust her was met with increasing anger from her, until at last she became fearful of her ability to look after him and Oliver went into care for the first time.